Collapse of the firewall

Sorry I still haven’t got to the story on Canada promised a fortnight ago. It’s a busy few weeks for me on other fronts, so it might still be a while. In the meantime, though, I wanted to devote a quick post to Sunday’s state election in Saxony-Anhalt, previewed here last week.

You can check out the official results here (“Zweitstimmen” is second vote, which is the one that matters). Basically the opinion polls were mostly right, but their small errors – and one in particular – just happened to be very important.

As predicted, the far-right AfD led the field by a wide margin, but fell short of a majority: its 43.8% of the vote (just over double its 2021 result) won it 39 of the 83 seats. The centre-right CDU dropped almost twenty points to 17.2%, winning 15 seats. The centre-left SPD, the Greens and the far-left Left finished in that order but very close together (better than expected for the Greens, disappointing for the Left), each winning eight seats.

So the three mainstream parties plus the Left, who at a pinch would co-operate in government, just barely outvoted AfD,* with 44.0% of the vote in aggregate, and exactly equalled it with 39 seats. The surprise was the remaining five seats, which went to the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW); the polls mostly had it falling below the 5% threshold, but it scraped in with 5.27%, or about 3,500 votes to spare.

And that matters enormously, because unlike the others the BSW is not committed to keeping AfD out of office. Although it originated in a split from the Left, many of its policy positions overlap with those of AfD – notably its Euroscepticism, its hostility to immigration and its pro-Russian foreign policy. Its leadership, both federally and in Saxony-Anhalt, has indicated that while it would not form a coalition with AfD, it would not stand in the way of it forming a minority government.

That position is controversial within BSW. In neighboring Thuringia, when BSW also won the balance of power at the 2024 election, it went into coalition with the CDU and SPD, thus maintaining the firewall against AfD. Wagenknecht herself criticised the decision, and the dispute came to a head last week when the majority of the party’s Thuringian MPs walked out to form a new party that would stay with the coalition.

It looked then as if BSW was on the point of disintegration, but now Wagenknecht and the other hardliners have a victory to point to, with which they seem set to allow AfD into government. No surprise that the result has made headlines around the world: history has given the idea of far-right government in Germany a unique resonance.

It’s just one state (and a rather small one); its importance shouldn’t be overstated. Given the strength of AfD over the last few years it was always likely that it would one day get to try its hand in a state government, and Saxony-Anhalt is about as inoffensive a place as that could be. Many extremist parties have come to grief when they’re obliged to translate their anti-system rhetoric into the responsibility of actually governing, so it may be that this represents a high point from which AfD will only decline.

If not, the world will hold its breath. We’ve seen this movie before.

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* That’s a slightly misleading statistic, because there are also mainstream parties that fell below the threshold (principally the Liberals, with 2.6%) and whose votes therefore don’t count towards seats. So while AfD and BSW have a majority of seats between them, that still represents only a minority of the vote (49.1%).